Only by weaving a net jointly formed by platforms, media, government, and netizens can cyberspace remain consistently clean.

The Spring Festival holiday has ended, yet the "Qin Lang losing his winter vacation homework in Paris" incident continues to draw attention.

Just as the whole internet was reveling over a primary school student's homework, "Qin Lang's uncle" confessed that his behavior was a staged stunt to "ride the traffic," and the relevant account was soon banned. On February 21, media reported that the authorities concerned were intervening in the investigation.

Self-media bloggers "adding drama" to themselves for traffic is not an isolated case, and there is a strong trend of such acts being staged repeatedly and intensifying. A couple of days ago, the matter of "a Shanghai female teacher reported for an affair with an underage student" drew attention; on the evening of February 20, many impersonation accounts posing as the female teacher involved sprang up on major platforms to start livestreams; on February 21, it was rumored online that a company in Foshan fined three employees 5,000 yuan each "for speaking Cantonese," but police later reported that this was fabricated to attract attention and that the company involved had only one employee...

These self-directed farces were baffling in how they became "popular" in the first place, and their abrupt end in this manner is even more absurd. The recurrence of such farces not only disgusts the netizens who have been toyed with, but should also prompt reflection across society.

If this distorted ethos of traffic supremacy is allowed to spread in cyberspace, it will not only waste precious attention resources but also inevitably make the online public opinion field fickle, shallow, sensitive, and divided, and may even trigger serious social problems.

The "scripts" of these self-directed fake news items share some common features: they all closely follow online hot topics, are adept at capturing and amplifying social contradictions and catering to netizens' emotions in their headlines and viewpoints, and often contain "shocking remarks"; most have obvious marketing planning or artificially directed "scripts," and their methods can by no means be described as anything other than "utterly bottomless"; after harvesting a large amount of traffic in a short time, they quietly exit, ultimately leaving a mess in the public opinion field.

The essence of commercial platforms is to pool traffic, retain users, and ultimately achieve monopoly, which also gives them an advantage over traditional professional media in splitting profits and competing for audiences. By controlling social relationships and setting algorithmic rules, platforms determine which information users see and how much of it they see. Driven by market interests, content models that users like and that yield rich profits will be widely adopted—this is the logic of traffic.

In the past, some platforms, for greater commercial interests, were lax in screening and reviewing self-directed fake news and only banned it once public opinion was aroused, invisibly creating a breeding ground for self-media that chase traffic.

In an overly fragmented environment, short, eye-catching news is more likely than in-depth, long-form reporting to achieve viral spread through short videos and become an online hot topic. To survive, some traditional media have had to adapt to and follow this content production logic, abandoning their professional mission of disseminating facts and delivering value, and serious content on the internet has been completely replaced by entertainment-oriented information.

In addition, netizens' awareness of tracing information sources is weak, which also lowers the cost of self-media "content laundering," leading to an overflow of homogenized content on various platforms and ultimately to bad money driving out good; few accounts are willing to settle down and produce high-quality original content, creating a vicious cycle in the public opinion ecosystem.

In the post-truth era, the public's basic requirements for news quality—such as truthfulness, objectivity, comprehensiveness, and fairness—will not change. While maintaining their commercial nature, platforms should proactively consider how to shoulder social responsibility and come up with more practical and effective solutions in safeguarding the speech ecosystem, protecting content copyrights, and balancing the distribution of interests.

At the same time, society also needs more forces to intervene in the supervision of self-media that single-mindedly chase traffic, and to give more legal deterrence to traffic bloggers who risk everything for profit.

In July 2023, the Cyberspace Administration of China issued the Notice on Strengthening the Management of "Self-Media," each article of which targets the crucial problems of self-media chaos. Some localities are also increasing penalties for violating accounts and striking hard at acts such as spreading online rumors, which has achieved considerable results.

In an era that pursues short, plain, and fast reading, ordinary netizens lack the ability to discern such information and are easily led by manufactured online hot topics. And some professional media, in the process of chasing hot topics, rush to forward and spread them without verifying them one by one, evidently becoming promoters of these fake news "scripts," which both exacerbates the chaos and disorder of the online public opinion field and damages their own credibility.

The internet has returned part of the power of information dissemination from media elites to the general public, and dissemination is becoming a public literacy and capability. Self-directed fake news is precisely the case of some people who understand dissemination using their ability in the wrong place. Only by staying vigilant against such behavior and weaving a net jointly formed by platforms, media, government, and netizens can cyberspace remain consistently clean.